Friday, September 18, 2009

Equality = freedom?

Of course, some supporters of men's rights will support paternity leave, some won't. This demonstrates how the perpetual drive for 'equality' can devide even those who have an otherwise close ideological alignment.

However, I want to consider another side to this story: does the quest for 'equality' actually result in more freedom in socity? I don't think it does.

For example, with an expansion of 'rights' such as paternity leave (or even with the existance of generous maternity leave for female employees), someone has to pay for it. Your 'rights' end up being my responsibility. Has freedom increased overall? No, you've just shifted freedom away from one person and towards another.

Equally, I think that by seeking to manipulate and engineer society, feminists and leftists risk creating un-expected effects. Science supports the notion that complex systems (be they organisms, the biosphere or societies) opperate in unpredictable and non-linear ways. Sometimes what seems like an increase in the freedom people enjoy can result in an overall diminution of freedom. For example, in the West women have the right to dress however they please (even, to a great extent, within the workplace, where women have a much greater lattitude than men to wear casual clothing). Part of this apparent freedom has resulted in women wearing high heels in order to make themselves appear taller and sexier. Many women, however, find such high heels uncomfortable or even dangerous or harmful to their skeleton. But if you are a woman, and you are surrounded by other women - in the workplace or the nightclub - who are all wearing high heels, not wearing them might make you seem less sexy or less likely to get promoted (I actually believe that, aside from differences in effort and motivation, disparity in workplace promotions is driven more by height than sex). So the freedom to wear high heels ends up resulting in the obligation to wear them. Interestingly, if you could somehow take away this 'freedom', whilst many women would complain, many would rejoice and find themselves MORE free.

Equally, freedom for women to wear what they like can result in a loss of respect for women in general, which in turn might be experienced by women as a loss of freedom!

My solution: we need a balance between individual freedoms and the considerations of the group or society as a whole.

Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."

PubMed, which indexes the 3,000 leading medical journals, from the 1950s to present, contains 42 articles on women’s health for every one on men’s health.